… or at least they’re thinking about it. And that includes Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who put in a great showing at last Saturday’s Mow Down Pollution event at City of Cuernavaca Park, and today’s guest gardener, straw (bale) man Zach Urban.

Here’s a Digging In scoop: Hizzoner says he and the wife are thinking of switching over part of their lawn to a vegetable garden. They have this big lawn in Park Hill, and well, why not? So I told Colorado’s favorite brew guy about Kitchen Gardener International’s “Eat the View” campaign, a push to get the next president to plant a vegetable garden on the White House Lawn. He seemed intrigued. “Well, you know I’m going to be meeting with Sen. Obama here in a few weeks,” he said. “Well, just think! You could set an example for the next president!” I told him. He said he’d think about it after the convention. And then it was mow, mow, mow:

[photopress:IMG_2506.JPG,full,alignright]

Golden’s Mayor Jacob Smith won the lawnmower race (I joined as a last-minute fill-in, and came in fourth — despite the fact that I’ve had practice with a Neuton. I blame the strappy little sandals I was wearing). A bunch of attendees won cool raffle prizes like electric mowers and battery operated chains saws, leaf blowers and weed whackers. Electricity for

[photopress:IMG_2524.JPG,thumb,alignleft]

the whole event was supplied by a portable solar array brought down by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. So it was very, very cool all around. And I was there, pushing copies of the Grow section and giving away organic eggplant seedlings from Seeds of Change. Organizer extraordinaire Rebecca Russo of the EPA, at left, plans to make the event even bigger, better, and more centrally located next year.

Meanwhile, back in the garden, Zachary Urban of Wheat Ridge has been playing with a technique I’d never heard of until this summer: planting veggies in straw bales. Friends of mine have a straw-bale jewelry studio, but bale gardening? Yep. Here’s a picture from Zach’s garden.

[photopress:balegarden.JPG,full,alignleft]

I’ll let him tell the rest:

“My wife and I bought this house last fall, and there was no garden on the property. I must have a garden to keep my sanity, so I pulled up the sod on a 23 x 23 ft area and tilled the soil and then placed eight bales on four spots in the newly plotted garden. Because my garden plot was a part of my lawn only a few short months ago, I wanted to begin to prepare the soil for many more years of gardening.”

On top of the bales, he planted “various peppers, tomatoes, peas, broccoli, cucumbers and celery. In my trips to the local nurseries, I have not found anyone else attempting this style of gardening. I have found most of my instruction online, and was wondering if there are any other local gardeners who are attempting the same style?”

Urban bought many of his veggies from various nurseries and grew a couple of tomatoes from seed. Then he arranged his eight bales. You place the bales in the garden with the sticks of straw running vertically (as much as is possible) to the ground, but you do not cut the ties that keep the straw together.

“Once they were set in place, I soaked them with water, and added some blood meal and let them “cook” for about a week. (Fertilizer + water + straw bales = 110+ degree heat inside the bales) After they cooled down, I dug into the bale with my hand to make a space big enough for the seedling. I then placed the seedling into the hole and covered the top of the bale with compost as a sort of
icing. With the drainage that straw bales provide, you can’t overwater the plants, but you have to let the bale cool down before planting or else the roots will burn up with all that heat.”

Urban also planted corn, radishes, pumpkins and potatoes in the soil — those wouldn’t do well in the straw bales. The great thing about the straw? It’ll eventually break down and can be tilled into his garden to provide organic matter.

“My only reservation with sharing this method is the scarcity of wheat straw bales,” Urban says. “I may have been looking in the wrong areas, or maybe it was the wrong time of year to find bales … but it was difficult finding the wheat straw bales. It is possible to use other types of bales, but using grass bales increases the need to “cut the grass” growing on the bales during the season as seeds in the bales sprout.

Some places to go on the web for more information about straw bale gardening are Dave’s Garden, which recommends the technique’s accessibility (no stooping! no digging!) and the North Carolina blog, “Leave Me Alone, I’m Digging.” The Beginning Gardening website, however, says this method uses “more water than you could possibly imagine,” — which gives me pause. Zach, I hope you’ll keep in touch so that all of us intrigued by this method can learn how well it does through the dry parts of a Colorado summer.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.